


The Physical Secrets of the World

by Gileonnen



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Barometric Foreshadowing, Canon-Typical Racism, Canon-Typical Violent Ideation, Domesticity, Explicit Dissection, Galvanism, Insults as a Form of Self-Defense, M/M, Students of Medicine, Vainglory and Ambition, Victorian Surgical Theatres
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8883139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: As students, Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll are unmatched: bold, ambitious, and burning to prove themselves. But as they plumb the sublime secrets of the body and the mind, they find they have much more to learn about human kindness.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pollitt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollitt/gifts).



> My thanks to the incredible La Reine Noire for beta-reading! All remaining errors are my own.

By the time the dissection concluded, the afternoon sky was black as pitch. Victor glanced out the window and found that, while he had been unraveling the nerves of the corpse's spinal column, a mass of roiling black clouds had come down from the north. A fierce wind rattled the surgical theatre's windows and whined through the gaps between the panes.

"I wish I'd brought an umbrella," he said to no one in particular as he waited his turn to wash his hands. A few fellow-students made sympathetic, half-listening noises, but no one answered.

It seemed trivial to speak of the weather after they'd cut a man open together. They'd all watched the faculty operate on the living, of course, observing attentively as this surgeon sawed off a suppurating leg or that doctor peeled back skin and fat to reveal blood-drenched viscera. But it was one thing to watch, and quite another to wield the knife.

The scalpel had been very sharp. The flesh had parted under Victor's blade with scarcely a whisper of resistance, and beneath it lay a dense tapestry of muscle and bone. In those skeins of nerves, those spiderweb veins and sunken arteries, he had briefly glimpsed the quiescent mechanisms of the human machine.

Even now, he dearly longed to make it tick again.

Victor dipped his hands in the carbolic acid solution and scrubbed them until they were clean of blood, then dried them on a white cotton cloth. The solution left his fingers feeling raw and flensed, every crease in his knuckles and palms stinging. The cool air only exacerbated the ache.

Lightning split the skies like a wound, and close behind came a burst of thunder that rattled the windows. As though the heavens had sounded a charge, rain began to lash down in earnest. Great silvery sheets struck the window glass and washed down it in a torrent that obscured the city from view.

Victor found that, once the lightning had dissipated, the windows of the surgical theatre were quite reflective. He studied his own face as he buttoned on his coat: hollow-cheeked, hungry, with dark circles under his eyes. It was a face that hadn't known a full night's sleep in weeks.

Victor turned up his collar and left the room. Behind him, the porters gathered up the remains of their lesson so that the body might be put to rest. He paced down the hall, which echoed with the dragging tramp of his fellow-students' feet. The others passed through the doorway to the quadrangle, pitching up black umbrellas as they did. Heavy raindrops struck the umbrellas like drumheads and produced a low, murmuring music.

He paused at the threshold, steeling himself to go through. It was only water. It was the least of the indignities to which he had subjected his body.

As he touched the handle, though, a voice from behind him said, "Just a moment. I'll share my umbrella with you, if you're not too proud for my company."

Startling, Victor turned. Even before he fully registered the other man's face, he knew the voice. He had heard it ring out dozens of times in lecture halls, probing for answers both mechanical and sublime: _What motive force causes the heart to pump, and what causes that force to cease? By what means does the brain consciously command the body? Could one write out the equation of the Self in chemical formulae, joining molecule to molecule until a soul emerges?_

He remembered, too, the long and clever fingers wielding a set of forceps throughout the evening's dissection. The man with the umbrella was Henry Jekyll, whose bright eyes had scanned the corpse on their operating table as though studying a text in a half-familiar language.

"Not too proud to share the company of genius," said Victor before he could stay himself.

Jekyll laughed, and the laughter transformed him. The hard lines of his brows softened; his lips (which had been compressed as though he were deferring judgment) broke into a grin of unaffected mirth. He had tied his long hair up for the dissection, and without it to curtain him off, his expression struck Victor as oddly frank and unguarded. It was, Victor thought, an uncommonly handsome face. "Not many would grant my genius so readily. Some would admit it by grudging inches, others deny it from spite--but from you, the declaration springs unprompted, even spontaneously. Are you really so afraid of getting wet?"

Victor flushed at the admonition. "Don't misunderstand me," he said hastily. Jekyll looked unimpressed, and Victor went on with gathering certainty, "Genius is no more than the spark of inspiration. A momentary gleam in a vast black void of ignorance, illuminating nothing of note. To praise a man's fleeting genius is as trite as to praise the ephemeral beauty of a flower."

"And yet you praise it all the same." Jekyll tilted his head. The low light of the hall cast half his face into shadow. "For the same reason that a poet praises a flower? To shake it free of mortality?"

"Genius does not outlive us," said Victor. "Only true discovery can withstand the crushing hand of time. This is where so many of our colleagues err. They study medicine to profess it, and because the law requires it. They want their licenses so that they can take up their fathers' practices and dispense laudanum to old men with pleurisies. They drive back death for minutes--perhaps for hours, at a stretch--and they consider their battle won. It's pointless."

Jekyll smirked. "And you, Frankenstein? Is there a practice waiting for you at home, or do you have a higher charge?" His tone was not mocking, although Victor suspected that many of their peers had mistaken it for mockery. There was no greater insult than to be issued a challenge to which one was incapable of rising.

 _But I can rise to it,_ thought Victor. His heart thundered against his ribs in softer counterpoint to the cacophony of the sky. "I understand that our work is neither abstract nor mundane. I mean to conquer death," he said, and then, "I've never told anyone that before."

Jekyll did not laugh, though Victor had half-expected it. "What good is it to conquer death, if we waste our lives in doing evil?" he asked, as though he genuinely thought Victor might have an answer. "So many lives spent in petty, meaningless cruelties, to say nothing of the grander evils committed by those with the power to inscribe their will upon the world. And you would conquer death to put the world eternally in their hands? No, my friend, we must conquer evil first."

 _My friend_ , he'd said, as though they had ever exchanged two words before today.

Victor gestured Jekyll ahead, and Jekyll passed through the entryway and tipped up his umbrella against the rain. There was room beneath it for two, but only if they stood very close.

It had been a long time since Victor had been comfortable with the intimacy of close contact. His pulse leapt as he moved in to grasp the umbrella handle and his shoulder brushed Jekyll's. Even through the wool of their jackets, he could feel the radiant heat of Jekyll's skin. With the relentless wind driving rain against his cheek, even beneath the broad shelter of the umbrella, that comforting warmth was a temptation nearly too powerful to be borne.

Then Jekyll shifted his grip on the umbrella and threaded their arms together, and Victor surrendered to the urge to cling. It neither warmed nor dried him through, but it eased him all the same.

* * *

Henry startled awake at the soft clink of the morning's milk delivery, and for a moment, he could not place where he was. In the grey half-light, he examined his surroundings. He lay in a shabby little room with mismatched furnishings and yellowed lace curtains, every table and chair strewn with a medical student's ephemera. In one corner, an articulated skeleton stood half-concealed beneath a draping cloth. On the floor near Victor's feet, an anatomical treatise lay open to a diagram of the nervous system. The nearest chair held a hookah of clouded green glass, its tubes coiling into a tangled serpents' nest of wires sheathed in vulcanized rubber.

The wires recalled him to himself. For the fifth time this week, he sat up on Victor Frankenstein's sofa and straightened his clothes.

Last night, he and Victor had rewritten the body in letters of crackling electricity. In the shared haze of their hookah, they had overleapt Galvani's commentaries on salt and copper and Volta's cautious rebuttals, Matteucci's chains of dead frogs twitching helplessly to produce a spark. The mysteries of the universe had cracked open before them to reveal a single, irrefutable truth: _There is a chemical in the nerves which transmutes thought to action, and it is this chemical that weds consciousness to life._ If they'd had a corpse to hand, the two of them would have unwrapped the nerves from their slick myelin sheaths and gazed upon the merry dance of lightning within.

This morning, though, Henry's own spark felt diminished, his limbs heavy and his mind dull. Gone was last night's pleasant lassitude, and with it the blade-clean simplicity of their revelation.

From the green velvet chair that faced the window, he heard a soft snore.

Henry smiled faintly as he rose to his feet. He padded barefoot across Victor's parquet floor and to the stove, which he fed until the embers began to blaze. This complete, he set a kettle to boil and extracted Victor's tea service from the cabinet--a more challenging prospect than in his own lodgings, since Victor's dishes shared shelves with his growing collection of anatomical curiosities preserved in alcohol.

_Alcohol_ brought him once more to the edge of the abyss of revelation, where fragments of theories began to crystallize into chemical formulae. _It isn't an alcohol, this secret chemical that pumps the heart and knots up the fist,_ he thought to himself as he measured out tea leaves into strainers. _Nor a salt, although the Italians hit closer to the mark there. One of the acetic ethers, perhaps?_

The kettle sang. Stirred from his meditations, Henry wrapped his hand in a towel and took the kettle from the hob. He poured two cups, then went to fetch the milk.

In the street beyond Victor's door, dawn's first light filtered red-golden through the haze from factories and foundries. The crisp spring air was cool enough to wake Henry fully from his lethargy, and he inhaled deeply for a moment before stooping to pick up the milk basket. Amid the common stink of the city, the putrid stench of fish and filth and urine, he thought he caught a distant aroma of daffodils or hyacinths.

"Ah," came Victor's voice as the door clicked shut again. "You're still here."

"Of course I'm still here, old man," said Henry, ruffling his hair in passing. "Disappointed?"

"Not if you've made tea." Seeing that Henry had, Victor rose from his chair quite slowly, as though his bones had turned to lead. "Thank you. I'm not sure I would have had the manual dexterity to manage it."

Not for the first time, Henry weighed the value of an admonition. Victor knew very well that he walked a fine line between his stimulants and his narcotics. He knew that he gambled his health on the slim chance of revelation. Chastisement would not break him of the habit. At last, Henry said only, "Man cannot regulate his sleep entirely by artificial means."

"The entire practice of medicine is the regulation of natural processes by artificial means," answered Victor. "To say otherwise is willful blindness or chicanery. And you seem eager enough to follow me in it." He toasted Henry with his teacup, then downed most of it in a swallow. Grimacing, he poured more hot water over the strainer.

It felt like surrender to take his own cup, but Henry was thirsty, and so he set the tea strainer to one side and took his cup back to the sofa. There, he drank deeply. "You will strain your body beyond endurance. Genius may be the spark you once described, but you cannot feed yourself to it in order to make it catch."

"If you keep nagging at me, Jekyll, our friends will start to ask after our wedding."

Henry's jaw clenched involuntarily. Forcing himself to lightness, he said, "That threat might carry more weight if I thought either of us had a friend beyond this room."

Victor must have heard the steel in his voice or seen the fire in his eyes, because he set his cup down and turned to face Henry. He seemed to gather himself, and when he spoke it was with the measured tones of a forensic orator. "It has lately occurred to me," he said, "how inefficient it is for us to go on like this. I've slept on your sofa at least as many times as you've slept on mine. You and I ought to take lodgings together."

"I see all of my friends have already begun to ask after the wedding," said Henry drily. "Is this about money? I would be happy to loan you--"

"It's not about money. Or not only about money, although I won't deny that my ambitions outstrip my means." Victor gestured with an eloquent roll of his head at the shabby little room. "I mean that it would be more efficient for us to work without maintaining two separate libraries, two separate specimen collections--the walk alone wastes a quarter of an hour in each direction--"

"But my own library is ordered as I choose it, and yours, disordered similarly."

"It's only your pride that makes you hesitate," said Victor, a light of triumph in his eyes. He pronounced it as an unanswerable declaration, as though to admit pride was to admit defeat. As though this conversation were no more than a trial of their wills, and one that he intended to win.

Henry had a sudden, clear fantasy of smashing his teacup to pieces. He drained it deliberately and set it down. At his side, his fist clenched and unfurled in time with his heartbeat. He reminded himself that it would serve no purpose to dash his knuckles across Victor's face, satisfying though the prospect seemed when he wore that insufferable, invincible look. "Pride? Yes, it is very much my pride, Victor. A man despised by all the world grows proud of his solitude, as though it's a kind of badge of what he has endured."

"Not all the world," said Victor.

"Is our arrangement really so unsatisfactory to you? You cherish your solitude. You have a great love for hollow books and drawers with false bottoms. It wouldn't agree with you to have me prying at every lock and latch."

"I keep my secrets to preserve our work, not for a love of secrets," said Victor. "If some jeering schoolboy should find a leaf of formulae, or if a housekeeper should stumble across bare nerves wedded to wires, can you even conceive of what a calamity that would be for us? The work _must_ be presented whole. Both a theory and a praxis. We must have indisputable proof, no less than a corpse--"

Henry rose to his feet. "Proof of what, exactly? You say 'our work,' but you mean your work: to return the dead to life. That was never my work. I won't throw my own research over to slave at your side as some glorified assistant."

Victor's eyes were bright, nearly feverish as he paced across the parquet floor and caught Henry by the shoulders. His hands trembled, but his grip was sure and surprisingly strong. "I mean _our_ work. The transmission of the living, conscious mind to insensate flesh, electrical and chemical at once. This is our work, Henry--yours and mine. If we could crack open this question, we would find the answers to both death and monstrosity." His face lay so close to Henry's that their breath mingled with each exhalation. "If we could crack this question, what doors couldn't we open together?"

Their urgent, restless proximity could not be borne. Henry caught him by the chin and kissed him hard upon the mouth, tasting tea and blood there.

They spoke no more of science or of lodgings that morning.

* * *

From the crash of books onto the hall table, Victor surmised that Henry had come home in a fine, high temper. "If you have my Broca, try not to obliterate it," he called from his chair. "His ideas on physiognomy might be rubbish, but I did want to see what he had to say on the cerebral cortex--"

"Your Broca" and Henry dropped Charles Bell's _An Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain_ in Victor's lap "is still out. This was the nearest thing. Find a resurrectionist with a body to cut open, if you wish to plumb the criminal brain. Or interview our colleagues at the university--there, my friend, there are criminal minds for the asking! A prostitute or a thief may be driven by hunger, but for the cruelty of these sniggering yahoos, I can see no explanation but innate evil."

Victor set the book aside and rose to help Henry out of his jacket. "What did they say to you?" he asked as he worked the buttons free. Under his hands, Henry practically vibrated with suppressed rage.

Henry's nostrils flared as he inhaled. "Repeating their calumnies would only stoke this wrath within me until I burn to a cinder."

"Then stoke it. Let the conflagration light our way to glory." He dropped the jacket over the back of a chair and caught Henry's smooth cheek in his palm. Without the buttons to distract them, they had to meet one another's eyes. "Have you forgotten? Our so-called colleagues are mere mayflies in the annals of history. We have a higher charge."

"A higher charge," said Henry with a low, harsh laugh. "It will not elevate me in their eyes. They will never see a chemist or a doctor when they look at me, not if I raised the dead like Christ in Bethany. What immortality can there be for the bastard son of a leper? What glory for a jumped-up little wog?"

In that moment, with his bright teeth bared and his lean arms taut as bowstrings beneath Victor's hands, Henry seemed entirely capable of murder. Victor had never held a gun, but he imagined that it must be very like this: to hold death in one's hands, and to feel one's own life roiling beneath the skin like an effervescent spring.

Henry wore his hair tied back today, as he often did when he went to assist with a surgery. Now, Victor worked it free of its tie and carded his fingers through it. His lips lay so close to Henry's ear that when he spoke, he felt the fine hairs on the shell of it prickle to attention. "In a decade, the learned men at the Royal Society will pant for an audience with you and delicately ignore the color of your skin. Thirty years from now, our portraits will hang in Burlington House beside the works of the old masters. And when Burlington House has fallen to rubble, our work will remain. Our work will endure, long after every one of the men who has mocked us has been consigned to the well-deserved oblivion of history."

At that, Henry turned his face into Victor's neck. His voice was thick, but he did not weep. "It gives me no comfort to know that history will one day obliterate them. I want to cut them apart, Victor. I want to take the tops of their skulls off and prise the secrets of evil from every fold and recess of their brains."

"Better to study what stays your hand," said Victor into his hair. "Or have you forgotten? The impulse to do good is at least as much a secret as the impulse to do evil."

"And more worthy of replication. Thank you. I would do well to remember that." After a deep, steadying breath, Henry drew away. He sifted through his pile of books, selecting a heavy volume of Spinoza's _Ethics._

They sat reading together on the sofa, Henry's head on Victor's shoulder, until the last evening sunlight faded and the lamplighters came to illuminate the streets.

* * *

The footlights brightened as the curtains drew back upon a stage divided. On the left lay an ornate garden, bursting with flowers and manicured trees; on the right lay a lavish sitting room. Studded French chairs and couches, all of them upholstered in a dried-blood burgundy, stood in cozy array around a brick hearth with a false fire crackling within. A young woman sat writing at a table as the scene began, her gown such a spotless white that Henry knew she was destined for murder or grief.

As an agitated man strode into the garden, Victor leaned over and murmured, "I've decided to go to London."

The shock of it made Henry miss the first lines. "To London?" he said, his voice loud enough that the nearest patron hissed at him to be quiet. Chastened, he whispered sharply, "What could you possibly want in London?"

 _Ill?_ said the man in the garden to some long-limbed, hound-eyed stranger. _No; you startled me, that's all._

Victor laid his hand on the armrest between them, and against his better judgment, Henry took it. "I've learned all I can in a university, Henry. We can go only so far on theory alone. Ahead of us, there lies only praxis, and for that, I must have what the resurrectionists offer. To understand the secret of death, I must unpin the bones and sinews of the world and try my hand at ordering them anew."

 _Yes, yes, I know. You have told me so._ The man looked very pale as he crossed downstage and into the glare of the footlights, while his hound-faced friend looked on with deep concern.

Victor had chosen this public, ordered place for his confession because he relied upon Henry's shame more than upon the better angels of his nature. Thus, it fell to Henry to find those virtues in himself.

"What is there to be said?" He turned Victor's hand in his own, folding the close-bitten nails into his palm. "It has been a pleasure to work with you. I wish you the very best in your studies."

"You could come with me," said Victor under his breath. At the offer, Henry looked away from the stage and into Victor's pale eyes. They gleamed with an unfamiliar avidity, a certain clarity of purpose like a lightning strike. He knew then that there would be no turning Victor aside from his choice, or from the hunger that lay beneath it. "You know that we work better together. With my understanding of galvanism and yours of chemistry, there is no hidden nerve that we will not track, no gland or organ that we will not wring dry of secrets."

"And my father would never let me rest."

"Your father would never need to know--"

"Can you really believe it so simple? He has too much to lose to permit me to secret myself among common men. If I do go to London, it will be on his terms, at his leisure--or when at long last he lies on his deathbed." He pressed Victor's hand and turned back to the stage. "I will try to join you, when I can."

"You will stagnate! Can you really love your peace of mind more than our work?" Victor demanded, still no more than a breath of sound. "More than me?"

"I can, and I do. You've never loved peace of mind, old boy, and that is why you can so easily dismiss it."

"Very well," snapped Victor. He turned aside in his seat and snatched back his hand. Reluctantly, Henry did the same.

On the stage, the pale man stood before the hearth as the flames burned merrily and the woman in white looked on. _Poor humankind,_ the man intoned. _Bound by laws as rigid as the sheepskin covers of the book that holds them. And I, who have toiled for freedom, doomed to eternal wretchedness, the possessor of a secret I dare not even whisper. Heaven help me._

_Heaven help me._

* * *

In the days after they laid Vanessa in the earth, Victor saw monsters in every alley and every darkened hall. A lean grey dog with gleaming eyes had him reaching for a pistol that he no longer carried; he flinched back from a smiling blonde woman in a white gown. On one cool evening as he returned home from rounds at a tuberculosis ward, he saw the moon glance whitely from a portly man's face, and he recoiled from the sight as though from his Caliban returned.

Each night, he lay watching the clouds obscure the moon, and his vigil did not end until the sun edged the horizon with gold.

In the needle lay a remedy for his condition, if he cared to trade one malady for another. On some nights, when each woman coughing blood recalled his mother's last, wretched days, he was tempted to make the bargain.

On other nights, he held the hands of near-strangers and mopped their brows, and he kept them company while they made the long passage from life to death. For the sake of those patients, he left the needle in its case.

He had found a packet of Vanessa's letters among his papers, when at last he could bring himself to sort through them. Most, he had never opened. _I hope very much that you are well,_ said one, which had lain unread during the nadir of his despair. _I entreat you to call upon me at home whenever you wish so that we might share tea and poetry, and while away these dark hours together. We who have endured much together must not be strangers to one another, not even when the world has grown strange and hateful. I am always, your very dear friend, Miss Vanessa Ives._

 _We must seek the ephemeral,_ he thought, and he remembered Vanessa's kind, clear eyes. _Or why live?_

She had thought herself entirely alone, at the end. So many of them had.

On this night, he washed his hands one final time in a solution of carbolic acid, then stripped away the mask over his face and replaced it with a warm woollen scarf. The nights had been cold, of late, and the days one long and dreary march of rain.

He stepped out into the street and pitched up his umbrella, hearing the soft patter of raindrops on the fabric. It recalled to him Coleridge's half-doleful, half-laughing ode, an he found himself smiling as he crossed the cobblestones. _It need not all be sublime,_ he told himself. _There is worth in a beauty that does not devour me whole_.

He stopped beneath a streetlamp and tilted his head up to watch its light glittering on the falling rain. _Fairy lights,_ Proteus had called them, and as the rain washed in braids of silver down the glass, Victor thought that he had been right to view them with wonder.

When he looked down from the lamp, he saw that he was not alone beneath it. A man stood there in a dark wool coat, hands in his pockets, the rain plastering his long black hair to his brow.

In Henry Jekyll's eyes, there was something like hope and fear commingled. _He must have sought me out,_ thought Victor, but then on the heels of that, _It doesn't matter whether he sought me out. He's here now. The both of us are here. We needn't be alone._

Victor held out his umbrella. "I'll share with you, if you're not too proud for my company."

For the first time in a very long time, he saw Henry smile. "I can never be too proud to share the company of genius."

**Author's Note:**

> The lines in the play that Victor and Henry go to see are borrowed from T.R. Sullivan and Richard Mansfield's 1887 adaptation of _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,_ released five years before Tennyson's death in 1892. In the world of _Penny Dreadful_ , different characters tread the boards, but the questions of science, ethics, and evil nonetheless demand to be dramatized.


End file.
